Deena Metzger: Two Poems

Tattered Flags Across Richmond Bridge

for Krystyna

The way two images become one occasion,
because the wind is a messenger,
and, perhaps, also a creator.
Wind, breath, spirit, the same
in languages arising from seeds
carried great distances,
even up river or across the sea
to be planted in distant places.

The land becomes a vast altar
before our eyes as we gaze,
eyes closed, at what is
sanctified between us.
The sacred does not need us
to manufacture anything,
but to tend what springs
from the soil, and even the fire
at the center of the Earth.

Today, an old friend sent a photo:
she is standing in a stream alongside
an Elephant who is healing
from the terrible work of our hands.

The flags flying between the eucalyptus trees,
have images of Wolves
who are, at this moment,
suffering the hunt.

A young Christian girl wrote from Georgia
asking about the Spirits and calling herself,
Little Lost Wolf.

Whatever we do or don’t do,
the water remains the water,
the air remains the air,
whatever dark burdens
we force them to carry.
And you, there,
gaze, with awe,
at the invisible, revealed by the flags breezing
along Richmond Bridge,
the way I, here, gaze
at tattered flags between the trees.

What we ask, is to hold each other,
as we lean into the wind,
or dive deep into the holy waters
in order to serve promises we made
before we were born.

*

Night Canoe

When the language of prayer
is a tree, walking,
or the steady oars
of a night canoe across the sky,
and each word spoken
is a step on the path
of not gaining on the future,
then, we can also go out,
as we once did,dodging Spider websslung across trees,tremblingas we give our word.

About the author

A poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, teacher, healer and medicine woman who has taught and counseled for over fifty years, in the process of which she has developed therapies (Healing Stories) which creatively address life threatening diseases, spiritual and emotional crises, as well as community, political and environmental disintegration.
She is the author of many books, including the novels A Rain of Night Birds, (2017), La Negra y Blanca (2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature), Feral; Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems; From Grief Into Vision: A Council; Doors: A Fiction for Jazz Horn; Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing; The Other Hand; What Dinah Thought; Tree: Essays and Pieces; The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take the War Out of Them; and Writing For Your Life.

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